


Games for Two Players

by weakinteraction



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Alaia and Cheris's relationship, from Alaia's point of view.





	Games for Two Players

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkcyan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkcyan/gifts).



They were at the entrance to the rooms Cheris had rented for the duration of her leave.

"You're welcome to come in," Cheris said. "If you'd like."

"Oh, I would."

When she followed Cheris through, the rooms weren't what she'd been expecting: comfortable and with a few luxuries, not at all the extreme spartan stereotype of the Kel.

"This is ... nice," she said eventually.

"I have a lot of back pay and a lot of leave accrued," Cheris said. She hadn't been very forthcoming with Alaia in the few dates they'd been on about exactly what conditions had been like on her long tour of the Trifold Gulf, but it clearly hadn't involved much time for rest, or opportunities for luxury. "I intend to make the most of both."

"You know, you're not like most Kel I've met," Alaia said.

Cheris turned, her smile indicating that she'd taken it as the compliment Alaia had intended. "You mean, I'm not a walking Kel joke?"

"Well, yes, I suppose," Alaia said. "Why, am I walking Shuos joke?"

"People in the other factions don't make Shuos jokes," Cheris said. "Well, maybe the hexarchs do, I don't know. But the rest of us tell Shuos stories. There's a subtle difference."

"Well, then," Alaia said. "Am I the protagonist from a Shuos story?"

"Ah, no, that's not how it works," Cheris said. "I would be the protagonist, and you--" Cheris pulled her closer "--would be the Shuos operative who only appears to be a mild-mannered comms technician, and is in fact after me for the secrets I know."

Alaia laughed. "You've rumbled me after all."

"Well, then, I must tell you my biggest secret of all: I'm too junior to know any secrets. Your complex inter-factional plot has already failed."

Alaia smiled. "You could be bluffing. I think I'll have to get to know you better to be sure."

Cheris smiled back.

* * *

When she was very young, Alaia hadn't really understood about the factions -- she realised later that all four of her parents belonging to different ones was very rare -- so when she'd heard her youngest mother greeting her middle father's brother as " _Shuos_ Effenz", she'd just assumed that he was "Uncle Shuos".

When she'd said it, both her mothers had given her The Look, the same one they gave her when her naturally jittery hands were Not Appropriate, Darling -- but Uncle Shuos had just laughed, and the name had stuck.

Uncle Shuos was only an occasional visitor, his work taking him away for years at a time -- another thing she realised as her life continued was that small mining colonies were generally of little importance to anyone, but least of all the Shuos -- but Alaia came to look forward to his visits.

The first time he brought her a game, she was eight years old.

"This is very old," he told her. It didn't look old: it was a small memory crystal that interfaced with the house grid to project a two-dimensional playing area in the shape of a cross, criss-crossed by straight and diagonal lines. Cute farm animals -- some sort of avian genus that Alaia didn't immediately recognise -- occupied it; in another corner, there was an animal she did recognise: a fox. "From long before the high calendar."

"How do we know it's old, then?" Alaia asked.

Uncle Shuos laughed. "Oh, Daddy Rahal would approve," he said.

"I know now that that's not how names work, you know. I _am_ eight."

"But you still call me Uncle Shuos."

"It makes you laugh. I like making people laugh."

"Let me show you how the game works: one of us will be these geese, and the other is the fox."

He went on to explain the rules: how the fox could remove the geese from the game board by jumping over them, but they could win by penning it into a corner so that there were no possible jumps to make.

The first time, Alaia played as the geese. After some early losses, she eventually managed to stop Uncle Shuos, but it was obvious that he was playing to lose.

"It would be fairer if you were allowed to move on the diagonals as well," she said, rather than confront him about it directly.

"That is a documented variant," Uncle Shuos said. "We can activate it if you like; look." He made a gesture and optional settings blossomed above the play area.

Alaia leapt into action, her hands flying through the volume: within a few moments, she had not only activated the new rule, but also switched which of them was playing which role and dug a layer deeper into the interface to make the fox significantly cuter.

"Very well, then," Uncle Shuos said. "Let's play."

He beat her that time, but the next time she beat him. They kept playing, switching roles occasionally, until her father came to collect his brother and his daughter because the food he had made for the family was going cold on the table.

"So," Uncle Shuos asked her quietly as they followed him to the main living area, "which would you rather be? Fox or goose?"

* * *

They watched a lot of dramas together, when they weren't doing other things. Some of them were legitimately good, some of them had certain aspects which were done well and could be appreciated by true devotees of the genre, but quite a few were firmly in "so-bad-it's-good" territory.

While Alaia had been perfectly happy to watch dramas along with Cheris, it had taken a little longer to persuade Cheris to play games with her.

They started simply, with some of the more popular Shuos games of the time. Trebled Stones had been designed from the outset as intentionally addictive to a broad spectrum of personality types, but no one in Shuos Command had predicted that Sculptures in Freefall -- which had originally been designed to tilt the balance of an ongoing power struggle within the Vidona in the way the Shuos preferred -- would go viral.

"You're playing to lose," Cheris said, when they were first trying Sculptures.

"Maybe," Alaia said guiltily. The mechanics were somewhat involved at first; she had only wanted to give Cheris a chance to explore some of the stages of the late game that they wouldn't have reached otherwise.

"Don't do that with me," Cheris said. "Promise me you won't play to lose."

"I promise."

Half a month later, Cheris asked, "Do you make games?"

Alaia was surprised it had taken her so long. "It's not part of my job," she said. "But yes. We all do, really."

The next day, during a quiet part of her shift -- which was most parts of it, really -- she installed a copy of her most recent complete version of Fox and Geese onto the public grid so that it would be accessible from Cheris's quarters. She took pains to avoid it appearing to those casually searching for entertainment, but did idly wonder if anyone else would come across it.

When she showed it to Cheris, she found it even more difficult than usual to keep her hands still. She was surprised by how much it turned out that she cared what she thought.

"And you invented this?" she said after studying the rules. Alaia could almost see the tactical cogs turning in her mind, analysing the situation. The embellishments she had put on the game over the years made it much more sophisticated.

"Adapted it, would be a better way of putting it," Alaia said. "The original is very old."

"Are we going to play?"

"Only if you want," Alaia said, meaning, "Yes."

"I suppose you should be the foxes." To balance the extra farmyard animals she had added on the geese side, Alaia had made the fox side of the game about an entire skulk, rather than a solitary predator.

Cheris lost her first game badly, but put up a much better fight in the second. After a while, she was consistently winning as the geese; Alaia wondered if Cheris was applying formation ideas, and whether she could tweak the AI to reproduce that. Eventually, she was able to persuade Cheris to try playing as the foxes.

"You win again," Cheris said after her fifth successive loss in the new role.

"We can swap back, if you'd like."

"No, it's late and some of us have an early start in the morning."

"Fair enough." Alaia waited for Cheris to say something unprompted, but then resorted to asking, "So, did you like the game?"

"I had fun," Cheris said.

Alaia couldn't decide what to make of that.

* * *

She didn't see Uncle Shuos for the whole of her time at the Academy, but he did turn up for her graduation.

"I suppose you think that you inspired me to join the Shuos," she said at the party afterwards, in a quiet moment between encounters with fellow students.

"That would be to make the mistake of vanity," he said. "I would rather say that I recognised a kindred spirit."

"You know, I've still got that game you showed me." In fact, she had tinkered with it endlessly over the years, coming back to it whenever she hit a significant milestone in her life, or a rough patch. At first, it had just been interface tweaks; then coding a customised script to play the game optimally or (as she generally preferred to play against) suboptimally, in one of a number of recognisable styles. Her Nirai mother had been grudgingly approving of that part of the project, at least. Then she began to elaborate on the rules.

"Would you like to play? For old times' sake?"

"What, now?"

"Why not?"

Naturally enough, there were gaming tables -- made up to look like circular stone slabs, but with buried electronics connected to the Academy grid in every one -- scattered around the sides of the hall the reception was being held in, but only a very few people were currently playing. Alaia and her uncle took their drinks over to the nearest unoccupied one.

"So," he said to her after they had played a few rounds. "You've decided to be a hound."

Alaia wasn't all that surprised that he'd worked it out. With all the optional rules she'd developed enabled, the current version of the game was more a farmyard management simulator than anything else, when played from the defending player's point of view. The fox's side of the game was woefully underdeveloped by comparison.

"I've been told that I have a particularly shapely occipital lobe," Alaia said. "Apparently my pattern recognition is in the ninth percentile."

"That's pretty high, but--"

"Amongst Shuos initiates. Second percentile in the general hexarchate population."

Her uncle nodded. "You'll be a superb analyst, I'm sure."

"And it's not like I'll be stuck behind a desk the whole time," Alaia said. "Part of the development programme involves secondment to another faction."

"Doing some sort of scut work for them, far below your real abilities, no doubt."

"Gaining a better perspective on how the gears of the hexarachate mesh together."

"Yes, I'm sure that's the official line," Uncle Shuos said. "I assume you've already started manipulating the people in charge of assignments to get one you'd prefer?"

"I've focused more on influencing the other people in my cohort to change their preferences," Alaia said. "Only one of them's worked it out so far."

"Well, that's what they'd want you to think."

* * *

They played a few more games, and watched a lot more dramas.

Cheris would get very excited about the duel scenes in particular, and Alaia learned a lot of detail about exactly how unrealistic they were. She found it endearing the way that she could tell how much Cheris enjoyed a particular series by how into nitpicking all the flaws she got.

There were many other things she liked about Cheris, too. The way she was always so polite to servitors, though she did find it odd when she realised that sometimes a servitor that seemed to be cleaning the room had done very little and was essentially watching alongside them during particularly dramatic scenes. The fact that she had never once asked her about Alaia's hands: all the other Kel she had met had wanted her to come up with a gruesome training story to explain the nervous tic, so naturally she had obliged them, dredging up a different one each time from the experiences of the other members of her cohort. She knew now that if Cheris ever did ask, she would tell her the truth: that the only thing Shuos training had done to her hands was fail to eradicate the tic that had been there since childhood.

Belatedly, for someone whose basic training had included a great deal about being constantly aware of her own emotional state and those of the people around her, Alaia realised she had fallen hard. She wondered if Shuos Command -- who were surely aware -- approved. There had been no overt sign that they didn't, but perhaps they knew they just had to wait. She'd recently received the details of her next assignment: in a couple of months, she would be transferred to a Nirai outpost in calendrically difficult terrain halfway across the hexarchate. The work itself would be tedious, but she knew that it was an excellent advancement opportunity, one she could hardly turn down. But now she found herself wondering if being given an assignment so precisely tailored to her desired career path was actually intended to gently prise her away from her Kel girlfriend. Not that Cheris was free, herself: even her prolonged period of leave would be coming to an end soon enough.

Alaia knew that she had some decisions to make. That the outcomes that lay at the end of the decision tree of their relationship were narrowing. "Mutually amicable breakup after fun had been had by all parties", the endgame Alaia had entered the relationship expecting, and that she insisted to herself Cheris had too, was now increasingly difficult to attain. "Long-term partnership" involved a series of messy compromises on one or both of their parts that made the probability of it coming out satisfying exceedingly small. "Messy breakup" loomed large at the end of most branches.

She got to work on a new game.

When it was finished -- or finished _enough_ , because Alaia knew that she was perfectly capable of tinkering with it indefinitely -- she took it with her on her next visit to Cheris's quarters.

Cheris laid on a particularly exquisite dinner, having persuaded the servitors to divert some rations from the mess. Alaia wondered if there was some special occasion she was unaware of, or whether the rumour mill had reached Cheris with news of Alaia's new assignment. Alaia hadn't wanted to bring it up until she knew how she thought Cheris would react. That was what the game was for, after all.

"I want to show you something," she said when Cheris seemed to be heading for the couch.

"Oh?"

"It's a new game. One I made up."

"For me?" Cheris asked. "I'm not sure anyone's done that before."

"Well, you did say you've never dated a Shuos before," Alaia pointed out.

"I suppose exchanging games is like flirting to you," Cheris said.

"For some of us," Alaia said. "But some of us take the games we make in our free time very seriously."

Alaia showed her the game: the basic mechanics were simple, two players advancing from opposing sides of a map to try and control the terrain, rendered in loving 3D detail on the projection she had designed, but also capable of being displayed very simply: to her surprise, she found that Cheris preferred to use that version.

It was all intended to be satisfyingly infantry-like for Cheris, but she had made sure that the ruleset was entirely symmetrical. Cheris, though, seemed to be ignoring most of the deception mechanics that Alaia was using.

As the midgame dragged on, the optimum collaborative victory slipping away due to the attrition of their forces, Alaia decided to reveal the location of one of her spy units. It wasn't the best move, tactically or strategically. But she wanted to see how Cheris reacted to discovering that the strategic promontory her forces were in the process of trying to secure was already occupied by Alaia.

Cheris reacted instinctively, reinforcing the units advancing on the ridge, even though the spies had minimal combat statistics and would be captured instantly in a direct confrontation.

Alaia looked into Cheris's eyes as she studied the board, trying to work out whether she realised that the game was a metaphor for their relationship. From the starting position, the two sides could come to a messy stalemate and each hold more of the map than either of them could if they completely vanquished the other. But that wasn't obvious, the mechanics both assuming and driving conflict just as the fact that she and Cheris were from different factions would in any future they might have together. Alaia had long known that her parents' four-factions-in-one-family arrangements were unusual, but now she knew _why_ , and why, perhaps, they had chosen to move somewhere so far out of the way that the needs of their factions rarely clashed with one another there. She knew that her eldest mother, in particular, had given up a promising Nirai career, even if she insisted that mathematical research could be done anywhere.

"It's your move," Cheris said.

"Oh, sorry," Alaia said. "So it is."

She studied the board, now, instead of Cheris's eyes. Cheris had left an artillery unit undefended in her rush to reinforce the ridge. It was the obvious move to take, and one that would give her significant tactical advantage. If she _didn't_ play it, Cheris might suspect something was up -- or worse, think less of her for having shown such weak tactical abilities. But it would make the game nearly unwinnable for Cheris, and the optimum nobody wins/everybody wins solution completely unattainable.

Alaia weighed up her move for a long time. Should she behave as expected: take the cannon, accept her new assignment with the Nirai?

It was Cheris who made the decision for her, when she spotted her mistake. She groaned and put her head briefly in her hands. "You promised me," she said. "You promised you wouldn't play to lose."

"What if I was playing to ... not win?"

"Same difference, isn't it?" Cheris said.

With a heavy heart, Alaia captured the cannon. "You know what, I'm tired. Why don't we stop there for tonight?"

"Oh come on, you can win easily from here," Cheris said. "Although--"

Alaia could see that she was already considering possible strategies for correcting for her mistake. Cheris wasn't so atypical of the Kel not to have a strong streak of stubbornness.

She stood and yawned ostentatiously. "Seriously, I'm going to bed. We can come back to this another time."

But Alaia already knew that they never would.


End file.
